Little Miss Ruby Sparks

I would like to nominate the summer of
2012 as the season of speculative science fiction and fantasy. Art house
film lovers have had several unique opportunities to dabble in the
mysteries of time and space and alternate possibilities. Sound of My Voice
kicked things off with a surprisingly grounded look at time travel that
had audiences questioning the idea as more of a con game run by members
of a religious cult. Safety Not Guaranteed, take two of the sci-fi time warp, mixed in decidedly more humor and an even stronger romantic vibe.

For Ruby Sparks, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine)
tag team with first-time screenwriter and co-star Zoe Kazan to tell the
incredible story of Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano), a young author who
finds himself struggling to complete the follow-up to the debut novel
that made him one of the brightest literary stars of the late 20th
century. Calvin is trapped by the fame generated from this
once-in-a-lifetime work and unable to connect with the world around him.
He spends time with his brother Harry (Chris Messina) and occasionally
drifts close to Langdon Tharp (Steve Coogan), a fellow author, but
Calvin longs for a deeper relationship, one that he can control.

Calvin dreams and we see, in the fleeting
fragments, what is missing. Calvin wants to love and be loved. He wants
those perfect moments, the kind that sound pitch-perfect on the page of
a great book or when captured onscreen. Soon, he’s able to wake up and
jot down snippets. Before long, those puzzling pieces become whole
chapters of backstory and character elements and then … the character
transforms into a person, a willowy redhead named Ruby (Kazan).

Calvin wakes one morning and she is
there, Ruby Sparks in the flesh, ready to prepare breakfast.

She is an
artist from Dayton, Ohio. She lives and Calvin can’t figure out the how
or why of the situation, but at first, he doesn’t care. After the
initial shock wears off, he embraces the secret mystery of her, the idea
that she is his. He retreats into a world with just her.

Eventually, he begins to let others in.
He invites Harry in to test the reality of Ruby and they play with the
boundaries of her life (and notion that her essence comes from what
Calvin types on the page). He takes her out into the world and she
starts to evolve into a sentient being, with wants and desires free from
Calvin’s control. She is Frankenstein’s monster in the modern age, a
woman loosed, which means that she is obviously far beyond anything that
Calvin, a thoroughly disconnected man, can understand.

The resulting control issues and Calvin’s
struggle to regain the upper hand trick us into believing that this
story is all about him, but the heart and soul of Ruby Sparks is
Ruby herself. We don’t know how she came to be, but she is — she is
alive and Kazan captures the wonder of living without a sense of knowing
human limits. Ruby truly is the spark in Calvin’s life, the catalyst
for change. She cracks his shell because she is attuned to the moment.
In some fantastic way, she is exactly what you would expect from a
character that has leapt off the page or the screen. She is not tied to
her backstory. She is all about the action of the present.

Nowhere is this clearer than when Calvin
tests her early on with his brother. Harry convinces Calvin to write
that she speaks another language to prove that she, indeed, responds to
his written conception of her, and as soon as the words appear on the
page — she speaks perfect French. Later on, things take a darker and far
more ominous turn as Calvin issues commands to impose his will on Ruby.

Yet, Kazan, through the writing and her
performance, makes us see that the story is about the emancipation of
this character. She is Pinocchio, longing to be a real girl, when, in
fact, she was always more real, more human than Calvin. Dano’s
performance falters, in comparison to Kazan’s, because he is relegated
to a more reactive position, staring in wonder at Kazan as she bounces
and bounds across the screen.

The speculative nature of Ruby Sparks
differs from the summer’s earlier examples. Here, the challenge is
greater for the audience because we must believe in something that is
never explained — a creative miracle without any basis in science or
fact — and thanks to Kazan, we do so willingly. (R) Grade: A-